The Big Man Read Online Free PDF

and Dan Scoular wasn’t good enough for her daughter.
    She had also been a very good cook and baker and the house had always been tidy, very tidy, but Betty honestly couldn’t remember when her mother had touched her spontaneously. She could recall her mother kissing her goodnight but that was a ritual, something she had decided you were supposed to do, not an unrehearsed act of affection. When she thought of her mother, and she had often tried so hard to do it justly, she thought of that voice like a barking dog forbidding the world to come near her. She thought of One Thousand and One Nights of clichés, of a Scheherazade whose frenetic variety ofrepetitions was not a postponement of death but of life, a charm against the dread of coming alive.
    And her father had fallen in love with that ability. She thought of the way he used to raise his eyebrows and shrug, as if in conspiracy with Betty’s outrage, but really – she had realised how many times since – in conspiracy with her mother. In return for those utterances neither of them could possibly believe, he was given his status, his small, imagined kingship of the house. Betty was, she had slowly and painfully come to realise, irrelevant here. A two-way charade was in progress. Nobody else knew the rules.
    Dan Scoular had been an innocent intruder. She remembered them talking to her after his first time in the house, when he was gone. Quietness had been the first thing, her mother moving about and doing things only she could have imagined needed done, her father in soulful conclave with the gas-fire. They were talking to each other with silence and she was excluded, except insofar as she was meant to understand that she had somehow failed them. Their silence was hurt, deep shock which she was supposed to realise she was responsible for.
    That night a lot of scattered misgivings about the way she and her parents lived had come together for her, and from them she had begun to make a kind of credo for herself. Her relationship with Dan had already given her an alternative sense of herself, an awareness of her own worth that contradicted her mother’s dismissive criticisms, which ranged from the way she dressed to her inability to cook. But the most painful forms those criticisms took were their trivial, momentary manifestations. It might be the way she had thrown down a magazine or the way she was sitting or a look she was supposed to have given. Her mother seemed capable of arranging endless ambushes in which Betty was taken by surprise and robbed of her self-esteem. Dan restored to her a more balanced sense of herself. His appreciation of her was like a constantly repeated present.
    That night, after he had gone, that sense of herself remained with her. His absence had stayed stronger than their presence, had enabled her not to become a part of her parents’ strange ritual but to maintain her own perspective on it and, with a quietdismay, understand what was really happening. Her mother had eventually stopped fussing around and sat down across the fire from her father.
    The atmosphere was one with which she was familiar. Sometimes, coming in from a night out, she had been invited into the lounge to sit with her parents and their friends. The invitation was usually extended with an elaborately insistent generosity, a privilege self-consciously granted.
    They all sat around with their drinks, playing a game Betty had decided to call pass-the-bromide. The reek of complacency in the room was as strong as formaldehyde. She used to wonder if they changed their smiles daily with the flowers. If anything strange were mentioned as having happened, the shock of it was quickly neutered to surprise by common consent.
    The only displays of strong emotion she had seen among them took a careful stylised form and seemed triggered by a pre-determined set of values. What was happening outside the immediate range of their own lives was disarmed, could provide no trigger for deep